“No Betting Allowed” is the notice that the enquiring stranger sees repeated several times on notice-boards over against the New Stand. To bet legally you must pay your sovereign, half-sovereign, or five shillings for entrance to the various enclosures in the Stand: to lay or take the odds in the open is an indictable offence. Yet there is nothing else but quiet and earnest, but unostentatious, betting going forward all the while among the crowd assembled outside the rails. The bookmakers in the various rings, sanctified and immune from molestation at the hands of the law, by reason of those entrance-fees, may be heard shouting the odds like maniacs, but here the case is indeed altered. Those notices might really, with more appearance of common sense, be spelled “No Betting Aloud,” for the very large amount of betting that actually does go on, under the very noses of the numerous foot and mounted police stationed here to prevent it, is conducted in undertones. Not whispers, by any means, but offers made by bookmakers in conversational tones, easily to be heard by the crowd at large, of so many to one on the field; with money changing hands, visibly and indubitably, for all the world to see, and the same familiar faces of the bookmakers at every race throughout the year. Here, in fact, we see the failure of an attempt to make the people moral by Act of Parliament—a failure that in its failing creates a great deal more immorality, and of a less venial kind, than that it originally set out to suppress, for there is nothing more certain than that the police, who do not see these things with the official eye, do most surely observe them with the merely physical eyes of ordinary human beings, and not only refuse to take proper cognisance of them, but “have a bit on” of their own, and thus place themselves in the Gilbertian position of rendering themselves liable to be given into their own custody for betting for ready money in a public place.